The past year has been incredible for all of us involved in WP Valet. Our team has grown from 2 to 8 and we’ve quickly realized that as we grow with customers and a larger team solid systems need to be in place in order to provide the highest quality support services. That’s why last month we made the switch away from ZenDesk and Asana and towards Salesforce.

Salesforce has long been a standard for online CRMs, but in 2011 they purchased desk.com and launched do.com as complementary services. Desk.com serves as a support ticket system and do.com is a project management tool. While both Zendesk and asana are great tools, we found that we had a real need for the ability to get an entire overview of our customer’s experiences. Every customer at WP Valet that with a dedicated account rep knows how helpful this person is. The person is aware of any trouble-shooting or debugging taking place on the site, any custom code that needs to be monitored during the weekly updates, and any custom development. It’s comforting to know that you have someone who’s regularly involved and managing your site, but what happens when that person goes on vacation or a new account rep is assigned? The process of getting a new person up to speed was time-consuming and because different types of work have different system requirements, there was no “global” perspective on any one customer to see what’s happening at any given moment.

Enter Salesforce. With the integration of Desk and Do, an account rep can review any interaction with the customer whether it be email, a support ticket, or a custom development project. Additional client notes are stored here and the customizable profile fields allow us to present the most commonly needed info in the right spots. It’s also presented across the three services, meaning we can show the right profile fields for any customer directly in desk.com. That’s pretty stinkin’ cool.

We have also found Desk.com to be more intuitive in terms of setting up notifications, rules, and flow for our tickets. Zendesk is very powerful and we’ve seen it used as a CRM and project manager in the past, but this never resonated with us. We prefer having systems that are actually dedicated to the task, allowing our team to manage things as efficiently as possible and getting our customers access and answers quickly.

Additionally, do.com has integration with Harvestapp. This means, when we quote for custom development, our developers can track their time and generate invoices with line items that directly link to do.com – no confusion on what’s been completed and invoiced.

Finally, there was a financial benefit to the move as well. Desk.com has an awesome role they call a “flex agent”. We’re only billed for a flex agent’s actual time in the system – and only $1/hr at that. We have a few regular maintenance tasks that only take a couple hours a week and this role allows us to provide our part-time team members with access to our support system in a way that scales over time.

There’s a ton of (very positive) changes in the pipeline right now and we’re really excited to be launching new products and services very soon. Stay tuned…